UX idea: Advanced highlighting and formatting for code editors and IDEs

It's 2014 but we still lack intellectual tools that could help us to produce high quality code.

As Steve McConnell mentions in his book 'Code Complete' naming standards are vital for any software project.

It's good for you if you have established one and if you adhere to a good naming scheme, even better if whole of your company does, but everyday developer's tasks include an amount of drilling down through code written by others. In the best case that includes looking through code libraries and legacy systems' code, in the worst case it's looking at the code written by your team member (and swearing through teeth cause he refuses to adhere to naming and formatting standards).

When you touch other's code you are on a foe's territory. Foreign naming standards rarely resemble yours so you first have to understand it and second you have to psychologically admit it (that's not always as easy as it seems).

That's where our overpowered CPUs can become handy. IDEs and code editors could know what semantic element is represented with each construct and so they could highlight it with typeface, font weight and color. An extreme example: ordinal type variables could be highlighted differently from class instances and so on. Such advanced highlighting could greatly help in understanding others' code.

There's some advance in the desired direction (see some themes for Sublime, that make use of advanced on the fly parsing), but there's still much to implement!

Another idea is to use CPU power to implement online formatting of code constructs according to your defined rules. This could be done for properly structured and compiled (or checked if we deal with interpreted language) pieces of code, so every team could look at the library code through their own "formatting lens". It seems not so convenient from original authors' point of view, as they will get bug reports with unfamiliar formatting, but they could use their own lens to reformat code back to their likes.

That's not new ideas, they are old ones (see Jeff Raskin's 'Interface', for example). Still such intellectual features are implemented at such a slow pace, that it's worth repeating ideas just not to forget them.